


When They are Both Full Grown

by tweedisgood



Category: Sherlock Holmes & Related Fandoms, Sherlock Holmes - Arthur Conan Doyle
Genre: F/M, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-26
Updated: 2015-12-26
Packaged: 2018-05-09 14:54:14
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 810
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5544140
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tweedisgood/pseuds/tweedisgood
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Christmas Eve 1894</p>
            </blockquote>





	When They are Both Full Grown

This morning’s frost is sharp as a scalpel’s edge, and I would not venture out unless I had nowhere else to go. Today, I do not. So many memories and secrets - of love and loss, of death and life. Those that I can carry with me, I will. The rest are safe enough here.

A tendril of ivy hangs over the door, ice crystals like tiny diamonds glittering on its leaves. It catches my eye as I turn and look at the house; as I bid a final goodbye to my former life. Evergreen and heart-shaped, growing from a stout stem that clings and twines, ivy leaves stand for wedded love and faithfulness. I wed my Mary in winter, on a day very much like this, and she had ivy wound in a thread through her golden hair, ivy in the spray of winter hazel she carried. I thought I could never be happier than on that day. When the plant which wound around us two was cut down, in the autumn of ’93, I thought I could never be happy again.

It is Christmas Eve. Six Christmases have come and gone since I left Baker Street, and now I give the old address to the cabbie, who tips his hat and grins.

“Dr Watson. A pleasure. Be there faster’n you can say ‘Sherlock ‘olmes.”

Have I only travelled full circle, you ask, only back to days gone by? Back to the same fireside, the same two chairs set on either side of it, the same quiet companionship of bachelors without a claim on the world; without posterity save for my stories?

No.

What I thought I had left behind was a man who, for all his friendless isolation, needed me as little as a man in high summer needs galoshes – good for the odd downpour, but not a disaster should one happen to mislay them at the back of the boot cupboard. When I was gone from his daily life he indulged more freely in his one vice, true enough; but still his extraordinary feats of detection ranged far and wide. His name was in the papers: the foreign honours he had won, they speculated, might soon be capped by an invitation to Buckingham Palace.

He was a king in the London woods, where every building stood for a great thicket, every street a well-beaten track, every den of thieves and murderers for a fox’s earth.

What could an ordinary physician going about his rounds, seeing to cases of croup and housemaid’s knee, add to that?

Perhaps it is true that I do not do give myself enough credit. But then, in how much debt am I to Sherlock Holmes? I only knew how he had saved me as surely as did Johnstone Murray in the ravine at Maiwand. How from the slough of despond, from the tedium of an aimless life, he had conjured adventure and purpose, friendship and a place for me. How, even when he left me and I thought him gone from the world entirely, those things remained, had become part of me.

It was a wire that did it. It so often was, the siren song that I could not resist – ( _”if inconvenient, come all the same”_ \- it never was quite convenient, but it was always glorious). One message led to another, until we were confessing by telegraph: pleading, explaining, wooing and at the last, positively seducing. How much can two men who know each other as we do say with metaphor, with reference to cases we had shared, with a picture in words of what was waiting for me, for him?

The cab rattles along biting cold streets in a winding wind. Half the population of London seems to be out in those streets today - shopping or visiting, working or idle, prosperous or poor. None of them know – not the most avid reader of the Strand, not the boys who delivered our telegrams, not even Mrs Hudson, struggling with her basket and umbrella on the steps of 221b, stepping out of the swing of the huge wreath of holly, berries like a scarlet thread running through it, that I sent ahead to grace our – our! –front door for the season.

The Holly’s signifier is foresight, and the promise of domestic happiness to come.

As I take the seventeen steps up and four strides along to the sitting room with its two broad windows, backlit to gold with the glow of Baker Street’s lamps, I hear behind the door the strains of a single violinist and a low, true voice giving out the old carol:

_The Holly and the Ivy, when they are both full grown:  
Of all the trees that are in the wood, the Holly bears the crown_

My hand turns the doorknob. My feet cross the threshold. 

I am home.

END


End file.
